was invariably a trap set by females: a ring in exchange for some perfunctory sex and then a lifetime of domestic servitude and--even more appalling--the rearing of children. Once again the poetry is unambiguous. "The Life With a Hole in It" conveys the cringe with greater complexity, but "Self's the Man" is not unrepresentative: He married a woman to stop her getting away
Now she's there all day.
And the money he gets for wasting his life on work
She takes as her perk
To pay for the kiddies' clobber and the drier . . .
from The Atlantic Monthly: Philip Larkin, the Impossible Man
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